The Satiric Verses

Friday, 22 February 2013

My fellow complex arrangement of stardust (you, reader), as
I put down my ever receding friend, my C10H14N2 inhaler, my lovely glowing
cigarette, and take the troubling love to think, I cannot still refrain from
complex emotions. The wonder experienced from the process which this poison
(nicotine is quite toxic - more than arsenic - 60 mg for a 70kg adult is
lethal) of pleasure enters my bronchioles, alveoli, blood, brain; triggering a whitewash
of dopamine to ensure my brief contentedness and to encourage more and more
more more! The terrifying image in my mind of the tissue of my lungs literally
blackening, and the surface area so necessary for the intake of oxygen slowly
decreasing. Not to mention the increasing chance of a mutation in the tissue,
commonly called, well, cancer. Also though, slight welling emotions as I
remember some of the great smokers; Christopher Hitchens “There have been moments of reverie, wreathed in
smoke and alone with a book, and moments of conversation, perfumed with
ashtrays and cocktails and decent company, which I would not have exchanged for
a year of ordinary existence.”, Oscar Wilde “A cigarette is the perfect
type of perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What
more can one want?”.Though, ofcourse, I
recognise this as sentiment. My bias is personal, and I am not immune to it
though I would never inflict it on others. Besides, to you it is probably just
meaningless babble, unless ofcourse these roots of influence are as unwilling
to be doused in pesticide and torn from your skull as mine seem. Not that I
have tried. The constant and, I would
add, necessary task of outgrowing illusions, or, such as free will, at least
acknowledging them is lifelong and brings much pain aswell as enlightened doubt
and engrossing curiosity and fascination. So I frustrate myself enough to know
the research, the dangers and the inevitabilities of my very much ‘T-minus’
habit. And as I write that very statement I cannot help think of an anecdote
involving Stephen Fry and Tom Stoppard at a dinner party where an American woman
in disbelief of Stoppard’s rigorous habit of inhaling and chewing
simultaneously, felt enough to say, “And you’re so intelligent!”, “Excuse me?”,
“Knowing those things are going to kill you,” she said, “still you do it.” To
which he replied, “How differently I might behave, if immortality were an
option.” I think that that particular sentiment seems particularly fluent while
my lungs are at this moment filled. I can’t write without an ashplant, I cannot
read for very long without one either. Nor does scotch taste as good,
conversation sound as interesting. Though much, I have read, is the same with
all addiction and it is not always a pleasure to be always tied to a substance.
I do not oppose any laws eradicating smoking in enclosed spaces, where the
effect is mutual but the habit not. Nor, I think, would I recommend a life seen
through smoke screens. This poison has been the love of my life, and I do not
say that without at least a tinge of sincerity, myself and this tobacco plant,
two distant cousins now tied in matrimony, products of evolution finding an
accidental company, once again join forces, to clear thought, read read read! and
the only fight I have ever known; the struggle with the illusory. My mind has
bonded my secular nature and love for argument, literature, science and the
curious with this very mortal compulsion and to light one, it has been, does
tend to light the other.

I am losing a friend. To the mephitic and odious infection
of evangelism, to the bloodless and sinister cult of ‘faith-healing’ and it’s leprous
and wart smothered sister, ‘prophesying’. Practices still peppered with fakes
and frauds, only too excited to steal advantage and rob the true believers of
reason and scepticism of any kind. My friend is no fake. A few sinful years
ago, it was drink and merry friends that gave meaning to his life, and it is no
hollow rationalization of mine to assume this. It has been a snowball from the
beginning, and it is reaching speeds and mass no reason can match. The snow,
was provided by a visit to an eccentric church that ‘specialised’ in
indoctrinating the young and aimless. Dragged along by a friend, he experienced
what too many atheists and non-believers dismiss as hokum. A religious
experience.

Churches such as
these are constructed to provide a setting that makes such experiences happen.
The structure of the service, a concert atmosphere followed by a hauntingly
convincing preacher, of similar age and social status, soothing his audience
with flowing tones and hypnotic prose. A thoughtless mass of susceptible minds,
so ready and unconscious, so disgustingly manipulated, so the next, is just an
inevitability. Some are homed in on - new faces, stand-alones, the disabled and
the melancholic – and are told something about themselves, statements so weak
and transparent to anyone who does not already ‘know’ and expect it to be true.
But they do know, the whole service provides this knowledge, they have been
told and suggested to by a seemingly trustworthy authority, and this knowledge
sticks like a tape worm to the very intestines of their will. It takes only a
touch or a shout that “Jesus, he knows and loves you, he has been with you and
suffered all your sufferings, He Loves YOU.” The expectation does the rest, and
they feel God, inhaled through their lungs, through every blood vessel down to
their toes.

These experiences do exist, it is real cognition, and you,
reader, have heard many versions. It is obvious that they often lead to
religious belief, though do not always happen in a church. The experience
comes, and then the mind fills all the gaps with whatever religion that is most
known or comforting or convenient. Instant faith. It is sinister. And there is
absolutely not even one minute piece of evidence that it is supernatural. No
evidence suggesting it is not just brain-function.

It makes nauseous to even ponder on these ‘stage-masters’,
whether they manipulate knowingly or unconsciously, I will always hold them
responsible for cultivating a distrust in scepticism and evidence.

So know, my friend, is a ‘faith-healer’, he walks the
streets using techniques that psychics and astrologers have used for centuries.
He ‘fixes’ broken thumbs, minor headaches and tobacco addiction, all miracles
all Jesus, yes I know, yes whatever. “But what proof, what evidence do you have
to reason that bone has grown instantaneously, that increased cranial
blood-pressure has decreased, that it is not simply endorphins you supply, not
simply illusions?”, I ask, “God told me.”

There is clear blockade, armed guards every twenty feet,
ordered to kill any reason that should try meander through to consciousness. It
is at best distressing. Argument is not useless, it is impossible. To approach
any conversation with the expectation of coherence is idiocy on my part. He now
considers moving to the middle-east on an evangelistic crusade, and my warnings
of the violence and prosecution, maybe even death he feels compelled to subject
himself to, are desperate and still unheard, unlistened, condemned and executed
as reason by his minds zealot protectors, at the impenetrable blockade.

It is exponentially heartbreaking, to feel compelled to
witness so much self-prosecution and self-disgust, so much damage and
compulsory misery, -the will of god - which one can force on himself. To feel
never once lost for words, when all words are so impenetrable.

Oh Vanity! You left me everytime curiosity became me.
Everytime the books were open and the sun was set, the universe would be
glimpsed without the selfish sun drowning out the cosmic echoes of its brothers
and sisters, preoccupied in the distance. The silvery sheen on the speckled
blackness, the sloshed luminous milk in a canyon of darkness, the devil
scattering pearls to never be grasped, just glimpsed for half a life, so God
can cackle at his insomniac creations trying to jump at them. Oh Misery. What
woeful insomnia is this, to have to stare at something so wakeful? To be forced
to dream without sleep? The smooth matte paint, punctured and torn from the restless
seas of photons, attacking nothingness with unorganised and distressing
delight! LET THERE BE LIGHT. A command only half obeyed. Or still does light do
battle with the darkness, the stars it’s surrounded soldiers, living life under
siege. Darkness is bliss, they are told, much like ignorance only less. Joseph
Smith; an amoral fraudulent twat? The cleverest of the cons? Unending
insecurity seeking unending love? IGNORE HIM! I can’t, he symbolises everything
I despise. HE DOESN’T! His followers do. Manic and Depressive, together at
last.

Being an atheist at Christmas, I thought, is a time when
obligations that bind and torture the faithful could be thrown behind ones
shoulder, to the wind, in the same guiltless pit where the illusions of one’s
youth were cast without regret or sentiment. The sceptical brain in growth.
Though now I have an unconsidered issue, the bonds are tied too tight between
Christmas and family, to discard one would be to offend the other. Especially an
extended Christian family containing a minister and his disciples, the warriors
of the Almighty Lord, contain – to my knowledge – only one other than myself
out nearly 30, that accepts Evolution by Natural Selection as anything other
than the ramblings of the unsaved. I am not a closet atheist, my unbelief is
well documented in their records, and I have experienced my share of shunning.
But at Christmas, the masks come on (one practice I refuse to partake), and I
am sincerely(?) welcome to attend and be merry. One practice that is not
uncommon at such gatherings is for me to be slowly surrounded or cornered,
where every torso is pointed at me, and beliefs discussed in an open and
organised fashion. My contribution to this discussion is not wanted. These moments,
for me, are thrilling. I enjoy argument to the point of obsession, and have
become rather adept, if I do say so….. Idea are propelled in my direction, to
here here’d, unconditionally by the rest. I take too much pride in subtle
pointing out the differences in their personal beliefs, not to mention the
contradictions. I enjoy this unholy tradition for it does have a propensity to
sharpen ones wit, if not just scrape the rust from the blade. Some members do
object, and their presence often means an end to such affairs, as does someone
cursing my existence – “jesus you’re a fuckin’ asshole, mate” – my response was
not well accepted by the crowd, “Blasphemy!” And yes, Christians can swear with
as much prose and skill as the rest of us blasphemers. Though this is the one
and only setting when religion is discussed. For the most part, banal
politeness and intolerable niceties fill the air with a high enough
concentration of carbon dioxide to send them all to heaven and me to hell. At
least the company would be interesting, and I could smoke.

One of the other roles an atheist must play when born in to
Christian ceremonies, is to be impolite. The amount of times one must say ‘no
thankyou’ in order to avoid hypocrisy.

‘Would you like to join us at the Christmas church service
with the rest of the family?’

‘No thankyou.’

‘Would you like to join us in
prayer?’

‘No thankyou’

‘Would you like to accept Jesus
Christ our Saviour into your life and be saved?’

‘No thankyou and please go away,
swiftly, please’

‘Would you like to help us
slaughter infidels to the god Ra?’

It may as well be. It is truly
white noise topped with the feeling of a mosquito buzzing nearby. Though these
family meetings happen rarely, and on some topics, the conversation can be
delightful. The immense and invaluable awe and curiosity the true wondrousness
of the universe and its complexity have been my life’s unmatched joy. To be
trapped in this curiosity, my life’s unmatched obsession. There has been such
beauty, love, sadness and doubt in this obsession. Though with my ceremonial
and audaciously religious family, I feel guilty to say, this is all
inaccessible. It is replaced by childish feelings of irrational guilt and
hopeless annoyance and boredom. It may be that very guilt that keeps me coming
to these moot gatherings. It is a common trade of Christianity (and maybe all
monotheisms), guilt. Everything is taken personally and all is offensive. And
with any person not related to me, I find it no great bother. Being offended is
useless, it offers no argument and a shit is rarely given. But this one
circumstance, the unconsidered circumstance, gives me more evidence for my
distrust in religious practices. Objectively, it is no problem, aside the brush
can swipe, but when it is the ones who were there from your first breath, who
have such claims and holds on your psyche, to use guilt as a method of control
deliberately is disgusting, to do it unknowingly is seeming more like the
methods of religion.

Thursday, 21 February 2013

Black dogs are on my tail. Fear becomes gravity, as if the
world is heavier, exponentially increased in mass. Depression is the proper
term, but it is so contaminated and unsuitable. It does not convey the feeling,
the pain, the way everything becomes black and lifeless, slow and shaded in
misery. Exertion of any kind is pointless and excruciatingly difficult. Every
food normally savoured turns to ash in my mouth. Sounds and colours lose their taste.

Thoughts of death are involuntary, they come and project
themselves on the surrounding world. I do not want to kill myself, I just
wouldn’t mind dying. My fear is lopsided; I fear almost everything but death.
Un-life, the lack of complex chemistry, not the opposite of life, just the absence
of it. It does not seem peaceful or desirable, awful or futile. But the human
reaction, the fear of death so wonderfully drilled into us by Natural
Selection, is gone. I can’t find it.

It is a sickness, not something that happens to the deserved
or the inferior, the weak or the sensitive ones. It is chemistry. I am
Chemistry. A factory error. IT IS NOT MY FAULT. But this rationality lacks influence.
It FEELS my fault, I feel I AM a cunt. I know, at least I think, it is untrue,
though I can’t shake the feeling that this is somehow a punishment. I take huge
solace in the fact that I have no wish to pray, to ask a ‘higher-power’ to fix
everything in exchange for my soul. Though it is irony that many do belittle
themselves by asking for forgiveness. For to do so requires the admission that
it is their fault are they are as pathetic as they feel.

I am Bi-Polar. And too many of us Manic-Depressives commit
self-slaughter. I should never think I speak for all who suffer from Bi-Polar
or indeed Uni-Polar Depression, but I will commit myself to honesty because of
the taboo and the chest-crushing shame that surrounds a disease so common, and
so lethal to not just those who suffer, but everyone around them. The taboo is
silent persecution, it is a guilt-trip on those who aren’t as happy as the world
wants to seem. It shouldn’t be so that the miserable should feel guilty for
being miserable, and the happy are praised for being happy. It is entropy, not
God or human will that guides (or un-guides) this universe, there is minute
control, if any, over how we feel and the circumstances we live in.

I considered posting this anonymously, not realising the
monumental hypocrisy in doing so. I
still feel embarrassed and un-polite if I do not smile at a smiling face in
public, and I am suspicious that many feel the same. The statistics so clearly
show that the people that cover the skin of Earth are not nearly as put
together as they seem. Though is an obvious usefulness of appearing well.
Genetically inferior males of many species employ tactics to ‘fool’ a potential
mate into choosing him (though many turn to rape, unfortunately).

I had hoped I would feel better after writing this – I don’t
– but I am almost certain I would if someone felt better after reading this.

Thursday, 22 November 2012

The life of a thought, as it sparks through the neurons, can be tremendous and short. They are rarely remembered, often vulgar or the brains responses to our bodily needs, though some, are so enthralling, that they send rouge and rushing waves through your every cell, calling your hairs to stand to attention and your skin to tremble as if it caressed by the softest of feathers. It was this very constellation of senses that changed my centre of gravity very suddenly to the chair I now sit, rambling at a keyboard. The phrase that sent me there, I will not postpone, was while reading an essay by Christopher Hitchens entitled 'The Catastrophist', on the science-fiction writing of J.G. Ballard. The phrase itself though, was anything but science-fiction. Hitchens quotes Sir Martin Rees in a lecture he gave in honour of the late Professor Joseph Rotblat: “Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.”

Imagination does not suffice! To think of creatures of unimaginable nature, so profoundly different from ourselves, gathering in numbers to watch the last moments of a dying star. And, the last moments of the life that feeds upon it. An event that would make Revelations cower and put angels on double-time. The final extinction on a planet, that already now has put 99.5% of all existed species, un-empathetically, to the metaphoric sword. Ah! But why dwell? 'Tis only another whimper in a galaxy with a million million stars, in a universe with a million million galaxies. And yet humans find it still so easy, nay, so comfortable that this entire entropic and beautiful universe was created with them specifically in mind. A god who did this, who created a universe only to wait almost 14 billion years before his favoured humans even existed on one of the maybe billion billion planets that inhabit this universe, so he could send his son, in human form to be tortured to death only 3 uneventful decades later. It even happened after almost 200 thousand years of human flourishing. I could only postulate that god himself may be under the influence of one of the many brain disorders he so graciously bestowed upon us. I do not think it unreasonable to criticise a belief that holds such solipsistic and supernatural specifics, I think it strange to say otherwise. I certainly don't respect them.

We are destined to live strange lives. Lives that absolutely are all about us, and lives that harbour such solipsism and ignorance, so conveniently forgetting the insignificance and minuteness of our quixotic wanderings. It a wondrous thing to be alive in this universe, an unlikely thing as it is to be alive at all. No god or mind behind it, no - as Christopher Hitchens puts it - celestial dictator to loom. It is not the son of god that we rely, but a sun of helium and hydrogen.

Thursday, 30 August 2012

'Illusions, of course, cannot be abolished. But they can and must be outgrown'- Christopher Hitchens

The blossoming of self-pity is no more veracious than when under the fertile ground of pain. It hurries to feed on self-critique, leaving solipsism and self-obsession the room to flourish without reason to prune and contain them. Bitterness is a paralytic, and fear a parasite. The fight against chronic pain is not a fight against pain itself, but a fight against these irrationalities and illusions. Objectivity is, as it has proved of itself, a cure of illusion when coupled with reason. There is a certain allure, if suffering necessary, to suffer for a cause. And there is reason to willingly comply to humiliating torture if what follows is recovery and the lessening of un-health. Though, where all allure and reason is misplaced or misused, is one's suffering where one cannot find irony.

Sunday, 5 August 2012

Is it cynical to suggest that organised religion is our species greatest embarrassment? To suggest that these ancient combines comprised of rusted reason and termite-ridden morality are destroyers of development? If it is, it shall cause me no discomfort to remain satirical and skeptical.

Sunday, 29 July 2012

Chopin, fine tobacco and coffee that lacks light and is sodden in my olfactory and gustatory systems start off this, just another, restless night. BUT!!! If suddenly, under a cognitive lapse, I swallow my cigarette and inhale my coffee, causing my lungs the bother of trying to extract and feed to my brain and blood, oxygen from coffee, and my lungs burn and stutter, causing, well, my death, should i spend my next thirty minutes being fitted for wings, smiling and dancing with unrecognisably un-decrepit relatives? I think not. AND, more profoundly, that if my hypothetical death scenario's reaper is sharpening his scythe and swapping the placement between my coffee and cigarette at the moment I type this, and before this gets titled and posted I'm twitching with my face in the ash tray, I absolutely hope that i will not be joining some cloud bouncing party with the people I love. And it is because that if heaven is a place where only constant happiness endures and misery is forgotten or impossible, then what is and was the fucking point? For it to be truly happy all things and memories annoying, disconcerting, boring, sad (a funeral of a friend for example), itchy, uncomfortable, of hunger, painful, loneliness, and yes, even empathy would have to be eradicated from our consciousness. And what would be left of those memories? Almost nothing for, I would guess, all of us. We could either not know of the suffering in an apparent hell, or, not even give the slightest fuck about the burning and tearing of flesh of bones of people we probably knew. I must ofcourse mention that trying to reason about a hypothetical paradoxical situation is rather difficult with almost completely unknown variables. And as my coffee finally drains the last of rather viscous matter down the tubes adjacent to my bronchials, I shall end my penning for this night. But never my pondering, my thinking, my reading. Hence the no sleep.

Monday, 16 July 2012

In the brisk flitted consciousness I have had the pleasure
and the pain to experience, I have noticed the forceful comings and the
hesitant goings of ideas of the supernatural. I may add though that I myself –
and I count myself lucky- have not ever had the desire for supernatural virtue.
Susceptibility to supernatural belief is something that seems innate in our
human condition, I might add, but that is not relevant and for another
pondering. On to the matter of miracles. The Christian mind has a way with miracles
which renders a deep suspicion in its reasoning that engages a great deal of
thought.The elasticity of what might
occur to be a miracle can stretch to the bounds of the ridiculous. The miracle
of a saved parking space to the miracle of sunny day seems to fit those bounds
rather snug. But what of things like shrinking tumours and the finding of a
long lost child? But of course these are things that could have gotten better
without the hand of god to squeeze a tumour small or guide the stork that saves
the child. I don’t want to go beyond the obvious and point out that, tumours
can shrink and children can find their own way home, but it seems I must to
prove a point. Of the millions of cancer sufferers there will undoubtedly be a
portion of those who pray, and undoubtedly a portion of those whose tumours
shrink, therefore a group will exist containing an overlap of the two –who pray
and whose tumours shrink. Are these therefore miracles? Of course not. The same
applies to missing children and to any other misery that could have gotten
better anyway. Miracles also have tendency more miraculous if told to a more
naïve, young or trusting audience. This brings up the point of the sincerity of
the teller. Whether it be control of minds, egoistic soothing, a coercive push
towards antique beliefs, an amount of scepticism is certainly necessary when it
comes to the authenticity second hand accounts. Personal agenda of the teller
or all the previous tellers who informed the even more previous tellers before
him is maybe an obvious reasoning, but a reasoning that has yet to burst
through the meninges of impressionable brains. Miracles also –like any
unbelievable word of mouth story- have a snowball-type effect. Through each
generation of the stories existence it might alter slightly from
misrememberings or mishearings and these effects get passed down to the next
generation of the story. There also is the effect added to the story through
each of its generations, including amplification of certain details for
theatrical effect or leaving parts out for censoring purposes.As these stories “evolve” -if I might be so
bold to use the term- the seemingly minor and superfluous details can retain
their place in the story, therefore becoming not, obscure and trifling
irrelevancies, but part of the dogma. Just to be complete I shall add that as
parent stories give rise and birth to daughter stories , an ever increasing
variety of stories shall exist, expanding and adapting, nay, mutating, meaning
two stories might have shared ancestors, but cease to have many similarities
with each other or with, indeed, their ancestors. The issue of “evolving”
stories retains practical relevancy only for miracles with a history
sufficiently large to have caused adaptations which change the probability of
the miracle being true. Now to a rather tedious endeavour - explaining the issue
of finding sufficient validation (of the mere miraculous) from biblical text. This is a rather hopeless and endlessly
insufficient proof, and I shall begin with an importation of words from a man
with better words than I.

“Here then we are
first to consider a book, presented to us by a barbarous and ignorant people,
written in an age when they were still more barbarous, and in all probability
long after the facts which it relates, corroborated by no concurring testimony,
and resembling those fabulous accounts, which every nation gives of its origin.
Upon reading this book we find it full of prodigies and miracles. It gives an
account of a state of the world and of human nature entirely different from the
present: Of our fall from that state; Of the age of man, extended to near a
thousand years: Of the destruction of the world by a deluge: Of the arbitrary
choice of one people, as favourites of heaven; and that people the countrymen
of the author: Of their deliverance from bondage by prodigies the most
astonishing imaginable: I desire any one to lay his hand upon his heart, and
after a serious consideration declare, whether he thinks that the falsehood of
such a book, supported by such a testimony would be more extraordinary and
miraculous than all the miracles it relates; which is, however, necessary to
make it received, according to the measures of probability above established.”

David Hume – An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

This passage (As the highest pitch of the eloquence of these
words ring in my ears, I have now a realisation, that this is what must be
meant by ‘Atheist Porn’) leads obtusely but directly towards my next reasoning.(A
miracle that seems molded to a biblical form, most probably, is molded from one.
As I make this assertion, it seems at
the present moment, to be of little relevancy to my current point, but a
tangent, into the relevancies of another.)
So I continue; Biblical text itself (the King James Bible,
preferably.) is suppurating with grandiose
miracles and scientific ignorance(and yet the Christian mind’s claim is that it
holds every answer you could ever need for scientifically graced, un-grandiose
life of the modern human) which immediately gives reason to suspect the truth
of any action in its poetry saturated pages. This book, then, falls from ever
affecting whether the miracles inside it are probable - to an extent which
would make the most deluded lottery junkies feel hopeless. The assertions of
biblical events remain evidenceless and unmatched by History, which is why
these very events are not taught to students as History, but as religion. The
reason most biblical events are not included is that fantastical lack of
evidence, and it is evidence that
gives us our knowledge of history. The French Revolution, Hitler’s Final Solution,
The Fall of Hellenic Society, are presumed to be true, because of the
overwhelming amount of evidence that is bestowed on us by the scientific
method. Therefore, the insidious suspiciousness that is validated by the lack
of evidence for biblical miracles, becomes an inevitability, an almost
necessity, in dealing with this matter.

About Me

I shall wander my fingers through the increasing viscosity of cigarette remnants that now seemingly inhabit my keyboard to inform this edit profile pop-up that I should only be described as curiosity with a limp, a twirl of a cane and an apparent sadism towards my own lungs.